"As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush was a nice read. Bush predicts the idea of the Web as he mentions the importance of building something that can capture and store all our knowledge as humans. Bush emphasizes the idea as "extending the human memory and the human ability to catalog, categorize, and recollect the totality of human information". Bush's concepts introduce the idea of "the memex" which pretty much simulates a computer setup. The memex contained two screens on it, switches and leavers, and magnetic tape for recording and storing data. If Bush could have seen the advances that technology made today, he would have been happy to find that the Web would live up to his visions and it would have been great to hear his thoughts on the types of modifications that could be made with our current setup since the access of information nowadays would not be so difficult as he originally thought back then.
I found "Long Live the Web" by Tim Berners-Lee to be a good read. Tim Lee's views on the importance of the Web and the role it plays in society really brought out how little I knew about it. Most average users would not pay much mind to it, but I agree with Lee's opinion on the importance of keeping resources open-source and royal-free. I think it is important for everyone to understand the basic principles that Lee talks about, especially the one about making the internet openly accessible to everyone so that we can continue to bounce off ideas and knowledge with one another. One of Lee's quote that stood out to me was, “the goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.” This ties nicely with his opinions on keeping the web an open source, and really made me take for granted how much the web has evolved over the years and its importance of it. Comparing how the net was once it first started out with how it is now, really made me excited about the future possibilities/ideas that have yet to come into the light. All in all, I believe that protecting the fundamental principles of the Web and acting as such should be the primary focus of it all, but as long as greed is involved we are only really prolonging our own progress.